Multiple MC clients on 1 cpu?

[DonkeyChainsaw]

Hi evryone,

 

For a school project we need to run 8 inecraft clients on one CPU. They adviced us to use a dual core CPU with vSphere Hypervisor from VMware. But since our teachers don't know sh*t about gaming they did not understand that you need at least a single core CPU for every client. So they offered to pay for a CPU if we would keep the budget low. But 8 core CPU's are really expensive. So we thought of 2 options:

 

1: Find a cheap quad core cpu with hyperthreading, which will make a total of 8 threads. And run one minecraft client on every single thread. But we are not sure if that will work. Any thoughts on that?

 

2: Find a cheap server motherboard that has 2 sockets and find 2 cheap quad core Xeon's. But that will probably be more expensive.

 

What about these options? Or are there some other ways to do this?

 

 

Thank you in advance.

[zMeul]

MC clients or server!?!? because vSphere is for managing virtualized servers

 

couple of problems I see: 8 clients/servers you need 8 threads but that doesn't include the cores required to run the OS and the VM environment

the 4 core 8 thread CPUs don't fit, you need to consider at least a 6 core 12 thread CPU ... Intel's i7-6800K and up

Edited November 28, 2016 by zMeul

[cj09beira]

 4 core with hyperthreading:

Look for xeons for the mainstream platform. Or find a dual socket motherboard. I would go for the one that is the cheapest 

 

[DonkeyChainsaw]

2 minutes ago, zMeul said:

MC clients or server!?!? because vSphere is for managing virtualized servers

Woops, think away the vSphere part. That should not be in it. So yea, just MC clients. Just like Linus 7 gamers 1 cpu.

[zMeul]

3 minutes ago, DonkeyChainsaw said:

Woops, think away the vSphere part. That should not be in it. So yea, just MC clients. Just like Linus 7 gamers 1 cpu.

see my updated post

[manikyath]

you can literally just open 8 minecraft clients... the difficulty comes in having seperate peripherals for each.

 

also, be realistic, a regular ordinary i7 has plenty of juice to squeeze 60FPS out of 8 clients, or see if you can pick up an FX8350 with a fitting mobo.

[manikyath]

8 minutes ago, zMeul said:

MC clients or server!?!? because vSphere is for managing virtualized servers

 

couple of problems I see: 8 clients/servers you need 8 threads but that doesn't include the cores required to run the OS and the VM environment

the 4 core 8 thread CPUs don't fit, you need to consider at least a 6 core 12 thread CPU ... Intel's i7-6800K and up

why not just share cores? it's not like minecraft *needs* the performance to reach 60FPS? my 4790k has clocked in 1000FPS at some point

[zMeul]

Just now, manikyath said:

why not just share cores? it's not like minecraft *needs* the performance to reach 60FPS? my 4790k has clocked in 1000FPS at some point

I don't think VMs are capable of sharing

and from what I recall, MC is very CPU intensive

[manikyath]

Just now, zMeul said:

I don't think VMs are capable of sharing

and from what I recall, MC is very CPU intensive

very cpu intensive, compared to how GPU intensive it is, but for regular stock minecraft you can gladly run 8 of them on a single i7 with performance to spare.

 

and i'd honestly just look into making something like virtualbox capture a mouse and keyboard per VM and call it a day. minecraft *works* in virtualbox with at least enough performance for a proof of concept.

 

if you wanna delve into it deeper, there's alsways Xorg multiseat to dive into: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/xorg_multiseat

 

it's like 7 gamers but without the virtualization part, and you're essentially all on the same linux OS.

[SLAYR]

1 hour ago, DonkeyChainsaw said:

Woops, think away the vSphere part. That should not be in it. So yea, just MC clients. Just like Linus 7 gamers 1 cpu.

Create 8 vms and then have each one open minecraft. Don't worry with gpu passthrough, or kvm passthrough. If the project is just to run them does it need to run them well? It should work on a modern dual core cpu unless you are doing something crazy.

1 hour ago, zMeul said:

I don't think VMs are capable of sharing

and from what I recall, MC is very CPU intensive

Vms can share cores with one another you can run several vms off of a single core.

 

 

[Matt_98]

2 hours ago, DonkeyChainsaw said:

Hi evryone,

 

For a school project we need to run 8 inecraft clients on one CPU. They adviced us to use a dual core CPU with vSphere Hypervisor from VMware. But since our teachers don't know sh*t about gaming they did not understand that you need at least a single core CPU for every client. So they offered to pay for a CPU if we would keep the budget low. But 8 core CPU's are really expensive. So we thought of 2 options:

 

1: Find a cheap quad core cpu with hyperthreading, which will make a total of 8 threads. And run one minecraft client on every single thread. But we are not sure if that will work. Any thoughts on that?

 

2: Find a cheap server motherboard that has 2 sockets and find 2 cheap quad core Xeon's. But that will probably be more expensive.

 

What about these options? Or are there some other ways to do this?

 

 

Thank you in advance.

 

 

I just bought a couple of  xeon 5620's for £14 they have 4 cores and hyperthreading so 8 cores and 16 threads (also 12 ram slots, Minecraft loves RAM)